A Cognitive Perspective on Teaching English Vocabulary for Language Learners in Iran

Abstract

The present study is going to investigate cognitive perspective on teaching English vocabulary as a foreign language in Iran. The discussion about vocabulary and its teaching and learning is one of the main issues in EFL / ESL teaching and learning research. The present study is going to survey some different ways for teaching English vocabularies. This paper refers to cognitive linguistic approaches to linguistic categories as research methodology. Thus, the aim of this study is to see if cognitive concepts played any significant role in word guessing. In recent years, the concept of linguistic categories has been used to account for the polysemous nature of individual words, morphemes, parts of speech, and even intonation patterns (Littlemore, 2009, P. 41). Based on cognitive linguistics (henceforth CL) various concepts of a word activate within a radial category, and those concepts are related through processes like categorization, prototype, metonymy, metaphor.